


Drawing from Life

by ladivvinatravestia



Series: Flash Fic [11]
Category: Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Bananas, F/M, M/M, Steve Rogers vs the 21st Century, Steve Rogers' Sexual Orientation is Double Dog Dare, bullying & teasing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-01
Updated: 2019-12-01
Packaged: 2021-02-26 02:47:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,541
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21636100
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladivvinatravestia/pseuds/ladivvinatravestia
Summary: Clint and Tony try to shock Steve with 21st century porn.
Relationships: Clint Barton/Phil Coulson (past), James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers (past), Pepper Potts/Tony Stark
Series: Flash Fic [11]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1540831
Comments: 16
Kudos: 258





	Drawing from Life

**Author's Note:**

> Additional warnings: Steve employs some 1930s/1940s terminology around being queer; characters discuss pegging; characters watch porn that includes bondage and flogging; characters watch tentacle porn
> 
> Thanks to the Hydra Trash Party for helping me brainstorm the various unwholesome ideas explored in this fic; thanks to [eternally_winding](https://archiveofourown.org/users/eternally_winding/profile) for the beta.

Steve has been trying to dodge this, but eventually he’s out of polite excuses and can’t get out of Stark and Barton’s increasingly insistent invitations for him to sit down and watch a “movie” with them in the Tower’s common room. The peculiar emphasis they put on the word “movie” tells Steve exactly what type of movie they intend to show him. He’s seen this script before, understands the part he’s supposed to play, even if the stage and the players on it are new. Stark and Barton will show him something they hope will shock him and then, as the morally-pure, plain-vanilla heterosexual paragon they believe him to be, he is supposed to be shocked and outraged. Stark even seems to be labouring under the misconception that Steve has never had sex or even seen a naked woman before. Once he’s given them whatever reaction they’re hoping for, they’ll tell him,

“Oh, relax, don’t you know that everybody in the twenty-first century has sex with the lights on, sometimes in the middle of the day.” And then they'll act like they’re laughing with him and not at him.

How in the hell is he supposed to want to work with these people? Maybe it’s time for him to reconsider that offer Fury made for him to work with his own STRIKE team down in DC instead.

Predictably enough, once the movie starts, Stark and Barton are surreptitiously watching Steve instead of the screen. Really, the biggest surprise for Steve about the pornography is the production values. Film technology and acting for the camera instead of the stage have made such enormous advances they are barely even the same craft they were seventy years ago. But Steve had already had time to be awed by all of that when he started working his way through the recommended viewing list Natasha put together for him.

“Trust me,” she’d said, “the best way to start fitting in like a local is to get a good handle on the pop culture.”

She’d also somehow known that he was queer, even though he’d been acting as normal as he could, and had assured him that, not only was it legal now to be queer, but that she didn’t personally want to work with anyone who had a problem with him being queer and would happily kick the ass of anyone who gave him grief about it. Which is how he manages to not even be slightly surprised when the pornography Stark and Barton are trying to show him turns out to show two men, together. He can feel Stark’s and Barton’s eyes on him, waiting for him to show a reaction. He’s plotting out what response to give when he sees a good target.

“There is no way that pizza guy just put the rubber on with his mouth,” he declares, sitting up and pointing accusingly at the screen.

Stark and Barton look at each other. This is clearly not the reaction they were expecting. Good. But they seemingly think they can still score points.

“Uhh, no, Cap,” says Stark, and it’s another mark on his character that he has never once addressed Steve as “Steve,” or even “Rogers.” Like he’s never stopped to think that there is an actual person behind the codename. “I’m pretty sure that’s a thing.”

“Of course it can be done,” Steve replies. He does, after all, have personal experience to confirm this. “But wind it back and watch the camera angles. They’ve cut away and then back, because this actor can’t do it.”

Barton looks at Steve with slightly greater respect than before, and Stark makes an impatient sound. But he dutifully puts the video back so they can all watch and confirm that, indeed, the actor’s lack of oral dexterity is disguised by the camera work.

“Fine,” says Stark, sounding disgruntled. “I suppose you can do it better.”

“Yes,” Steve answers, aiming for the same tone he’d use if asked if he could do ten push-ups in a row.

Stark sits up and points an accusatory finger at him, his eyes narrowed. “Bullshit,” he says.

Steve raises an eyebrow at him.

“I’m calling your bluff,” says Stark. “You’re going to have to put your money where your mouth is.”

“You don’t want to take the Smithsonian’s word for it that I was skilled at oral motivation of my men?” asks Steve. The Smithsonian exhibit actually says that Steve was skilled at oratory, but hey, similar enough. Barton makes a suspicious coughing sound.

Stark rummages around in the drawer of one of the end tables and comes up with a slightly battered condom packet, which he tosses at Steve. Steve grabs it out of the air and considers the next part of his plan. If Stark thinks Steve is going to demonstrate his skill on Stark, he has another think coming. Steve’s eyes light on the bunch of so-called bananas in the fruit bowl on the coffee table. They’re a disappointment to eat, but they’ll serve well for this purpose.

He selects the largest banana, pops the condom into his mouth, and then slowly and deliberately takes the banana into his mouth and down his throat, maintaining eye contact with Stark until Stark has to look away, his cheeks flushed a dusky red. When Steve is done, he pulls the banana out of his mouth again and waves it in the air in triumph.

“I’d like to see you do better,” he challenges.

“Uh, I never mastered that trick,” mutters Stark.

“What, you didn’t want to ruin your $8000 suits getting on your knees?” Barton asks. “I can do it. Toss me a raincoat.”

“Fuck you, I give great blow jobs,” says Stark, but he tosses another condom packet at Barton. It is at this precise moment that Ms. Potts enters the room. “Don’t I, Pep?”

Ms. Potts’ lips twitch. “Tony,” she begins.

Barton slides the entire banana down his throat in one smooth motion.

“I haven’t asked you to demonstrate that particular skill yet, but if you’re keen to show off your abilities I’ll dig out my favourite strap-on,” Ms. Potts continues.

And that, thankfully, is the awkward end of Barton’s and Stark’s attempts to embarrass or shock Steve with twenty-first century pornography. At least, for the time being.

~~

“Know what, man,” says Barton later in the common floor kitchen. “You’re alright.”

“I’m glad I meet with your approval,” says Steve drily. Natasha looks like she can’t decide who to kick.

“No, I mean it,” Barton continues. “It’s too bad you and Phil weren’t able to get to know each other better. I think he would have like getting to know the real Steve Rogers, not just the guy in the fancy costume.”

Steve runs through a mental roster of the people he’s met in the future and comes up with only one Phil, the Suit who’d awkwardly tried to make small talk with him on the flight to Stuttgart.

“Agent Coulson,” he says.

Barton’s smile looks sad. “Yeah,” he agrees.

“Oh, were you close?” asks Steve, his mouth moving ahead of his brain.

At this, Natasha seemingly decides it’s Steve she needs to kick, and she does.

“I don’t know,” says Barton, “were you and Barnes ‘close’?”

“Touche,” Steve replies, looking down at his cup of coffee and feeling suddenly like he would rather be under heavy fire than continue this conversation.

“Yeah,” says Barton, “I get where you’re coming from.”

“But was it your fault that -“ Steve begins, then stops short. Nobody wants to hear about his grief. It may have just been last month for Steve, but for everyone else it has been seventy years.

“It kinda was, though,” replies Barton, staring off into the middle distance. Steve thinks it’s a much more tenuous chain of circumstances leading from Barton’s falling under Loki’s spell to Coulson’s death on the helicarrier than the direct link between him failing to catch Bucky and Bucky falling off the train, but if he tries to reassure Barton about the events of the Battle of New York, it opens him up to hearing useless platitudes about how Bucky’s death wasn’t his fault, and he’s not up for talking about that right now.

“Okay, that’s enough moping,” announces Natasha. “Let’s go shoot some things on the range.”

~~

Shooting things with Barton while studiously not talking about their untimely departed lovers turns out to be a pretty decent method of bonding with him, and before long Steve is thinking of him, tentatively, as a friend. He has yet to warm up to Stark, though, and Stark doesn’t exactly help his own case when he skids into the common room kitchen, interrupting Steve and Clint’s late-night pie-eating and not-talking get-together with,

“Cap, Cap! I found something else you really need to watch!”

“Can we keep eating our pie while we’re watching?” asks Clint, his mouth full of pie.

Steve, using some buzz words he was recently exposed to at a SHIELD “Sensitivity and Diversity” workshop, says, “Is this going to be another teachable moment for workplace harassment?”

“This isn’t the workplace,” says Stark dismissively, which tells Steve everything he needs to know about what he’s about to see next, but with a shrug he picks up his plate of pie and follows Stark and Clint into the common room.

“I promise you haven’t seen anything like this before,” says Stark, a predatory gleam in his eye. He sits down on the couch and pats the seat for Steve and Clint to sit next to him.

“Okay, but if he has, you owe me coffee for the next year,” says Clint.

Stark makes a dismissive noise and queues up whatever new thing it is he thinks he can shock Steve with.

And, to be fair, Steve hasn’t exactly  _ seen _ the kinds of sex acts he’s currently seeing on the screen, but he sure as hell has been an enthusiastic participant. On screen, the diabolical pirate captain has just restrained the handsome young hero by bending him over the yardarm and securing his wrists to it with rope.

“Those knots will never hold,” Steve objects. He is, of course, aware that pornography seldom makes an attempt to be truly realistic, but it does get the desired reaction from Stark, who sits forward and turns to stare at him.

“I was in the army,” Steve reminds him, affecting an innocent expression.

“No, this is a sex thing,” says Stark, making illustrative motions with his hands. “You understand that, right?”

“Well, I certainly hope so,” says Steve. On screen, the pirate captain has pulled out a cat o’nine tails made of some sort of fur and is flogging the hero, who wiggles his bare behind appreciatively. “It’s kind of disappointing, though,” Steve continues. “It’s so much better when you use something that actually leaves welts.”

Clint chokes on his coffee.

“Cap, you’re no fun at all,” whines Stark.

“I understand if it’s not your cup of tea,” says Steve, intentionally misunderstanding Stark’s source of disgruntlement, “but believe me, with the right partner, kink can be a lot of fun.” His voice doesn’t waver and he’s even able to avoid lingering too much on the memory of the last time he and Bucky had been able to play together.

Stark opens and closes his mouth, for once at a loss for words.

Clint has turned as purple as his shirt with suppressed laughter and eventually finds enough equilibrium to say, “Coffee. For a year.”

Steve figures at this point that he has no real obligation to pretend to watch the pornography. It’s an awkward thing to want to do in the presence of two men he has no intention of - what’s the modern term? - hooking up with.

“No, wait, wait, I have one more thing we can try,” says Stark.

Steve crosses his arms, trying to radiate how thoroughly unimpressed he is with the situation, but that seems to heighten Stark’s interest in whatever strange contest of wills this has devolved into.

“You have something  _ more  _ fucked up than gay BDSM pirate porn,” says Clint. It’s more of an observation than a questions.

“Oh yeah,” grins Stark. He’s been fiddling with the controls to the screen on his tablet, and now he presses play on something that turns out to be animated. Steve recognizes the art as the Japanese style known as anime.

“You want to show him tentacle porn?” Clint whistles, sounding impressed.

Steve smiles to himself and digs out his phone. If that’s what the next challenge is, he already has a plan.

Stark puts a hand out as if to stop Steve looking at his phone. “Hey, you don’t have to look anything up, it’s tentacle porn, it’s exactly what it sounds like.”

“I’m watching,” says Steve. He waits patiently as Stark fast-forwards through whatever excuse there is for a plot that sets the scene. Two nubile young women, wearing skirts impractically short for an expedition into a cave system, have seemingly fallen into a deep pit and are being menaced by a mass of writhing green tentacles. Then, right on schedule, one of the women is picked up by the ankle and dangled upside down in midair, her shirt falling off and her skirt flipping over so that more tentacles can tease at her nipples and vagina.

“Oh no, no!” she cries unconvincingly, reaching out with both hands to caress one of the probing tentacles.

Stark has been watching Steve carefully and now he pauses the movie. “You’re not - even - a  _ little  _ bit shocked by any of this?” he asks.

In response, Steve shows him the picture he’s brought up on his phone - the Hokusai woodcut commonly known as the “Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife”.

“I did go to art school, you know,” he says.

Stark squints at it. “And you studied - medieval tentacle porn?” he asks.

“Shunga is a well-respected genre of Edo-period Japanese art,” says Steve blandly, “usually in the form of wood block prints and sold as single sheets or in books of twelve -“

“Okay, okay, I get it,” says Stark, putting his hands up in surrender. “I give up. Nothing shocks you. Barton, I’ll buy you coffee for a year. No, scratch that, I’ll buy you kopi luwak for a year. Cap, what do you want?”

Clint says, “Isn’t that the cat shit coffee?”

“Yep, rarest and most expensive coffee in the world. $500 per pound,” says Stark.

“I kinda prefer Taster’s Choice,” says Clint.

Steve has been and continues to be shocked by the prices people are willing to pay for food these days, and also by the kinds of things people think of as prestige foods, but it’s clearly better if he doesn’t say anything about that right now.

“How about if you start by calling me Steve instead of Cap all the time?” he says.

Stark looks at him with narrowed eyes. “Steve,” he says slowly, like he’s testing it out.

“That’s my name,” agrees Steve.

“My dad never shut up about you,” begins Stark. He’d said as much before, on the helicarrier before the Battle of New York. Steve nods, not sure where this is going. “I would never have guessed you were actually pretty cool.”

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Visit me on [tumblr](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/ladivvinatravestia), where my asks box is always open to prompts.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Still Life with Condom Wrapper](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22658140) by [ladivvinatravestia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladivvinatravestia/pseuds/ladivvinatravestia)




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